Brazil's Secret: Crazy Tobacco

APO 20.12.97 17:14


Copyright 1997 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of the Associated Press.
By TODD LEWAN
AP National Writer
SANTA CRUZ DO SUL, Brazil (AP) -- Freakish tobacco plants that explode from the soil in this remote river valley grow huge leaves on stalks as thick as Louisville Sluggers. The growers here call it fumo louco.
Crazy tobacco.
Crazy not just because it grows so big and so fast. Crazy because it has been genetically altered by one of the world's largest tobacco companies to pack twice the nicotine of other commercially grown leaf.
The farmers of Brazil's southernmost state are growing it by the ton for the world market, The Associated Press has found, though it could not be learned for certain which countries are importing the nicotine-rich leaf.
Fumo louco -- the farmers' generic term for several related strains of high-nicotine tobacco -- is the offspring of a genetically altered plant created in U.S. laboratories for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the third largest U.S. cigarette maker. The seed was then secretly shipped to Brazil in violation of U.S. export law.
Over the past year, the AP has observed its cultivation and harvest on small farms all over the state of Rio Grande do Sul, from Paulo Berganthal's 10-acre, table-flat plantation, to Neury de Oliveira's 20 mist-shrouded acres in the high country.
Some of these varieties are so high in nicotine that smokers might get sick smoking them in their pure form, but they can be blended with cheaper, weaker tobaccos to make cigarettes with nicotine levels that satisfy smokers.
Fumo louco blends give cigarette makers a new tool for adjusting nicotine levels in their products. They may also provide the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with a new argument for the assertion that the tobacco industry intentionally manipulates nicotine levels to "hook" smokers. At stake is the question of whether the FDA should have the power to regulate nicotine as a drug.
The FDA has been aware that a high-nicotine tobacco had been developed but did not know that it is being cultivated in large commercial quantities, said Mitch Zeller, an FDA deputy associate commissioner.
However, 18 Brazilian farmers openly acknowledged they are growing the high-nicotine leaf by the ton, and many said they have been growing it for more than five years.
"It's weird stuff," Oliveira said in his native Portuguese. The nicotine content is so high that "just the crazy smell of it gets you dizzy. But sir, it comes up like nothing you've ever seen."
Farmers estimated that half of the roughly 40,000 acres under tobacco cultivation in the region are devoted to the high-nicotine leaf. That means an area about one-and-a-half times the size of the island of Manhattan is covered in fumo louco.
The farmers said they sell their high-nicotine tobacco to Souza Cruz, a Brazilian company owned by B.A.T. Industries, the same British conglomerate that controls Brown & Williamson.
Souza Cruz did not respond to questions. Brown & Williamson spokesman Mark Smith said that "it would be inappropriate for us to comment" because of pending government investigations. The U.S. Justice Department has convened grand juries in Washington, D.C., and New York state to investigate whether tobacco companies and their officials lied to the government about manipulating nicotine levels in their products.
After farmers sell their fumo louco to Souza Cruz, it goes to the company's processing plant in Santa Cruz do Sul. Souza Cruz boasts it is the world's biggest. About a third of the tobacco processed at the plant is high-nicotine leaf, according to Louis Radaelli, a company genetics researcher, and several former Souza Cruz technical experts.
Once the leaf enters the plant, it is difficult to learn where it goes. Souza Cruz mixes it with other tobaccos to form some of its blends, and the recipes are trade secrets.
Souza Cruz is among the world's biggest exporters of tobacco, and about a fifth of its production goes to cigarette makers in the United States. Britain, Japan and Germany are also major customers. The company does not use high-nicotine leaf in cigarettes marketed in Brazil, but declined to explain why.
The FDA learned in 1994 that Brown & Williamson had developed a nicotine-rich plant code-named Y-1 and that limited quantities had been grown in Brazil in the early 1990s. Some of it was imported by Brown & Williamson, which used it as an ingredient in five cigarette brands sold in the United States in 1993 and 1994.
Although this was legal, the FDA was concerned enough about the implications to disclose its findings to Congress in July of 1994. Brown & Williamson executives responded by assuring the agency that they had dropped the project and stopped using Y-1 in their Raleigh Lights, Richland Lights King Size, Viceroy King Size, Viceroy Lights King Size and Richland King Size cigarettes.
That appeared to be the end of the story. It wasn't.
The AP has learned:
--Y-1 cultivation began in Brazil in 1983 -- years earlier than the FDA realized.
--Souza Cruz, according to its own figures, shipped nearly 8 million pounds of Y-1 to the United States for Brown & Williamson between 1990 and 1994 -- nearly double the amount the FDA knew had been imported.
--Souza Cruz's own experiments with Y-1 have produced hundreds of new strains of high-nicotine tobacco, some of which are being grown commercially in Brazil.
Months after the FDA's Y-1 disclosure to Congress, growers and Souza Cruz agronomists said, the company ordered farmers to stop cultivating high-nicotine strains.
But the growers have kept planting it and, they say, Souza Cruz keeps buying it, praising its quality and paying top prices.
The commercial production of genetically altered, nicotine-enhanced tobacco may have implications for the pending $368.5 billion tobacco settlement between cigarette makers and attorneys general of 40 states.
The biggest stumbling block to the settlement is whether the FDA should regulate tobacco as a drug. Tobacco companies contend that nicotine isn't addictive and insist that they vary nicotine levels in cigarettes solely for taste. The FDA views nicotine-enhanced tobacco as a tool for deliberately controlling the dosages of an addictive substance.
The story of how fumo louco leaped from a laboratory experiment in the United States to a cash crop in Brazil also raises questions about government efforts to regulate the biotech industry's use of genetically altered material.
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It began in, of all places, a U.S. government lab.
It was 1976, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was trying to develop a "safer" cigarette.
Specifically, the USDA wanted to create a tobacco that would be low in tar, a sticky residue linked to cancer. Cigarette companies knew how to reduce tar by chemically treating the tobacco, but this also removed much of the nicotine, the substance smokers crave.
Dr. James F. Chaplin, a breeder at the USDA's Tobacco Research Laboratory in Oxford, N.C., thought the answer was to create a strain abnormally high in nicotine. That way, he said in a 1977 paper, the removal of the tar would still leave plenty of nicotine behind.
At a cost of about $2 million in USDA money, Chaplin crossbred several wild and commercial tobacco varieties in an effort to boost nicotine levels. He developed five new varieties, field-testing them at the Wilson, N.C., farm of Hubert Hardison, who worked for an affiliate of Brown & Williamson.
Hardison said his only involvement was to plant the seed. "I was the farm boy, I guess. Somebody to do the work. You send me some tobacco seed and I grow them."
After the field testing, Chaplin discarded all but two varieties, code named Y-1 and Y-2, said Dr. Vernon Sisson, a longtime colleague of Chaplin's at the USDA in Oxford.
"They had the best aroma, and the highest nicotine -- between 4 and 5 percent," he said. "That's what they were looking for."
According to Sisson, Hardison brought Y-1 and Y-2 seed to Brown & Williamson. Chaplin, who resigned from the USDA in 1986 to work for Brown & Williamson, declined to comment.
In the early 1980s, Brown & Williamson took Y-1 to DNA Plant Technology, a biotechnology company founded that year in Cinnaminson, N.J. At DNAP, the company later told the FDA, scientists used state-of-the-art breeding techniques, including processes known as protoplast fusion and hybrid sorting, to genetically alter the Y-1 strain.
David Evans, DNAP's project manager, did not respond to requests for interviews. The company did not respond to a list of questions.
When Y-1 emerged from DNAP's laboratory, it had a nicotine level of 6.2 percent -- double the amount of any tobacco commercially grown in America.
"What they had done was unheard of," said the FDA's Zeller. "All of a sudden, you had tobacco that was twice as powerful as anything out there."
Nothing in U.S. law would have prohibited Brown & Williamson from growing this new tobacco in America. However, a quality-control agreement between growers, cigarette makers and the government stipulates that tobacco with nicotine levels lower than 2 percent or greater than 4 percent is not eligible for federal price support. That means American farmers would have little interest in growing it.
Besides, Brown & Williamson CEO Thomas Sandefur would say in 1994, growing Y-1 in the United States would make it too easy for competitors to get the seed.
But in a remote region of Brazil, Brown & Williamson had a corporate sister.
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Y-1 and Y-2 seed first arrived in Brazil in 1983, according to Arcangelo Mondardo, a former Souza Cruz soil expert and tobacco researcher who worked on the project from 1983 to 1992. Mondardo is now a professor of agronomy at Unisul, a university in Santa Rosa do Sul, Brazil.
Seed was shipped to Souza Cruz in boxes marked "samples." More was stuffed in plain envelopes and sent by air mail, said Mondardo and two other Souza Cruz agronomists who worked on the project.
According to Zeller, Janis Bravo, a former DNAP scientist, told FDA investigators that she personally shipped more than 10 pounds of Y-1 seed to Brazil in one calendar year prior to 1991. Bravo declined to comment.
Jefferey S. Wigand, a former Brown & Williamson vice president for research (and the highest-ranking executive to turn against the industry), has testified that Phil Fisher, who was in charge of tobacco blending and testing for Brown & Williamson in Louisville, Ky., flew to Brazil "several times" with Y-1 seed hidden in cigarette packs. Fisher -- now retired, though he continues to work as a part-time consultant for the company -- declined to comment.
At the time, U.S. law prohibited export of tobacco seed, pollen or live plants without a special USDA permit. Permits could be granted only for quantities of a half-gram or less, and only for experimental use.
Neither Brown & Williamson nor DNAP ever sought such permits, said William Coats, an administrator at the USDA's tobacco division. The permit requirement was eliminated by legislation signed on Dec. 13, 1991, after tobacco companies lobbied for the change.
In late 1983, the growing began in Brazil.
That first year, Souza Cruz distributed Y-1 and Y-2 seed to 100 plantations and harvested more than a ton of the leaf, Mondardo said. Over the next several years, Souza Cruz distributed seed to hundreds more farms, most of them in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
Production increased steadily, Mondardo said. One former company official, who asked not to be identified, said production reached 4.5 million pounds by 1990. Since it takes a pound of tobacco to make 20 cartons of cigarettes, 4.5 million pounds of high nicotine leaf, blended with weaker tobaccos in a 1-to-5 ratio, would be enough to make 450 million cartons.
By 1987, the company dropped Y-2 in favor of Y-1, according to Mondardo. Y-1, he said, "had a stronger stalk and lost fewer leaves in the wind and rain. It matured better, had a better aroma. Most important, it was higher in nicotine."
In the early years of production, Brown & Williamson employees came to Brazil to observe the progress, Mondardo said.
"I test-smoked Y-1. Phil Fisher smoked it, too," in cigarettes blended with other tobaccos, Mondardo said. "It not only satisfied you, it gave you, well, a sort of pleasant high."
But there were bugs to be worked out.
Y-1 was too susceptible to some plant diseases. Worse, it produced fertile seeds that could be easily stolen and used by competitors. The company couldn't get patent protection for the plant because U.S. law permitted patents only for species altered by recombinant DNA -- a technique that had not been used to develop Y-1.
Souza Cruz and DNAP, the biotechnology company in New Jersey, both went to work on the problems.
In Brazil, Souza Cruz used crossbreeding on plantations to create hardier versions of Y-1, and created hundreds of new lines of tobacco from the breed. "Each one had a secret code number," said the source who worked on the project for about 10 years.
"We weren't just working for Brown & Williamson," said Volnei B. Sens, the agricultural operations manager for Souza Cruz in Rio Negro from 1987 to 1990. "An objective was to improve our own lines."
Mondardo said that by the time he left the company in 1992, "they had created about 1,000 new lines, and selected the best for commercial purposes."
Eloy Roque Sterz, a Souza Cruz field technician from 1991 to 1993, said he saw company reports showing the nicotine level of one hybrid at 8 percent -- nearly three times pre-Y-1 levels.
"The way it looked, grew, smelled," he said, "you couldn't NOT see Y-1's blood in it."
In the early 1990s, world demand for quality tobacco outpaced production. Souza Cruz saw the hybrids as an answer, said Adelar Fochezatto, a supervisor in Souza Cruz's tobacco experimentation department from 1986 to 1990. Cigarette companies could buy cheaper, weaker tobacco and blend it with the hybrids "to keep nicotine levels up where they needed them," he said.
By 1990, both farmers and former Souza Cruz agronomists said, the company was handing out seed from some of these new hybrids for farmers to grow in their fields.
The following year, both Souza Cruz and DNAP had succeeded in producing sterile varieties of Y-1 -- plants that could not reproduce without the artificial addition of special pollen. That September, Brown & Williamson applied for a U.S. patent. A basis for the patent, as stated in the application papers, was that DNAP had used recombinant DNA techniques to map the genes of Y-1.
Pollen and seed for the sterile Y-1 created at DNAP were soon shipped to Brazil. Seventy grams of pollen were sent in three shipments in 1990, according to export certificates obtained by the AP. Fifty pounds of seed were legally shipped in 1993, another export certificate showed.
"With all of that pollen and seed, you could blanket all of Europe in tobacco," said Dr. Sebastiao Pinheiro, a leading Brazilian agronomist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
A 1981 Brazilian law forbids growing of foreign plants capable of "causing irreversible damage to genetic banks, ecosystems or humans." A 1995 law prohibits the cultivation of imported, genetically altered plants or hybrids made from them without government permission.
Growing large quantities of Y-1 and its hybrid cousins may have violated those laws, said Paulo Afonso Leme Machado, a law professor and President of the Brazilian Society of Environmental Law, and Dr. Eliana Fontes, a member of Brazil's biosafety commission.
Pinheiro and Machado said that large-scale growing of the genetically altered plants "could change the gene pool of our native tobacco species," and might pose unknown health risks to farmers. Fontes said Souza Cruz never applied for permission to grow those varieties. Souza Cruz declined to comment.
Once Y-1 was made sterile, several farmers said, Souza Cruz attempted to destroy all fertile, high-nicotine varieties to protect itself from competitors. But it was too late; the company had lost control of the varieties.
Farmers, who had taken a liking to Y-1 and its offspring because they brought high prices and cut about six weeks off the growing season, already had begun producing their own Y-1 seed and were swapping it among themselves.
They are still doing that today.
"Souza told us to stop planting louco," said Laury de Oliveira, 33, who owns a 10-acre farm. "But I don't listen. Look at it. In just two months it's up over your head. Now why am I going to stop? Nicotine?"
Enoir Mueller, a former Souza Cruz field instructor who grows fumo louco on an 8-acre farm, said: "The company line is that what we're planting today is different tobacco, but anyone who works with the stuff knows that's just a story."
Fumo louco brings the best price from the company's buyers, said David Moraes, another small farmer.
He led a reporter to his sorting barn. Lighting a match, he threw open the door.
Bitter air buffeted the senses. A sting in the back of the throat tightened into a knot. Lips tightened. Eyes tingled, itched, watered. A queasiness spread from the pit of the stomach up through the chest.
"That," said Moraes, turning up a kerosene lamp, "is the bite of fumo louco."
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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Randy Herschaft, AP investigative researcher, contributed to this report.

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